This jam is now over. It ran from 2015-12-11 01:30:00 to 2016-01-15 01:00:00. View 4 entries

Update: The theme has been announced: "Sports which could never exist"!

Welcome to the Iowa City Game Dev group's first ever game jam! The jam will begin shortly after the theme is announced at the December meetup and conclude at the beginning of the January meetup. Developers of all skill levels are welcome and new devs especially are encouraged to try their hand at making a game!

Not sure where to start? Check out the resources listed at the bottom of this page!

Rules:

Participants will have about one month to create a game from scratch

"Scratch" in terms of personal work...no existing code/assets may be used if you created them, but you may use third party resources as long as they are publicly available.

All entries must make use of the "theme" announced at the beginning of the December meetup in some way

This is a fancy way of saying "locals only" without being too specific. Keep in mind that both of these groups are free and easy to join if you want to participate!

You are not required to attend either jam-related game dev meetup (December/January) to participate, but it is highly encouraged. Even if you can't make the meetups, you can still submit your entry online and we'll play it at the January meetup!

Games must be submitted to this jam page before the deadline to be considered "qualified" entries to the jam

There will be no official judging/voting at the January meetup, but we also don't want folks to be tapping away on their laptops while others are presenting their work, so it's "pencils down" at that point!

You'll need a free itch.io account in order to submit your work here. The site is very easy to use, but you may want to familiarize yourself with it prior to the last few minutes of the jam to make sure you know how to submit properly (feel free to e-mail me or tweet me if you need help)!

There are no other explicit rules or restrictions (game engine, platform, team size, etc)

Have fun with it!

Resources for new devs:

Sortingh.at: A great web tool that breaks down exactly what you need to start making games based on your personal needs.

Platformer Example for Construct 2: Construct 2 is a free (with limitations) engine that Virtually Competent has used for every release to date! This is a small example (with source code) that Eric created for teaching the tool at a previous game dev meetup.

OpenGameArt.org: Not an artist? Not a problem! Lots of free art/sound/music assets are available from this site.